In the media production world of audio (e.g., radio, audio CD, streaming IP audio, and podcasts) and video (cable, television, DVD, streaming video, and podcasts), content developers presently need to write a script, record audio and/or video content based on that script, and then manually edit the content into some form of output (e.g., a movie, a radio program or a multimedia presentation.) This creative process is inherently a one-to-many approach in that there is a single output for an entire audience. That is, the television program that you see is the same one your neighbors see.
Attempts have been made to customize the media experience by allowing the preferences of individual users to drive the presentation of repurposed media segments. The term “repurposing” is used in the media industry to refer to when media originally produced for one purpose (e.g., television broadcasting) is re-used in a mostly unmodified form for a different purpose (e.g., web streaming). The term “segment” is generally used in the media industry to refer to a standalone unit of audio or video, such as a news story, a sports highlight segment, or a commercial. In many instances, content is made up entirely of linear segments assembled by the program's producers prior to, or concurrent with, transmission to the end-user. Approaches that rely on repurposed content create experiences that lack integral continuity and, therefore, provide no mechanism for media producers to control, predict, or manage the variations of content that the audience experiences.
One approach of this type has been to collect repurposable segments, for example, from a wide variety of unrelated production sources and categorize the segments. Then, when an end user contacts a cataloging service, the system can prepare a list of segments that would likely be of interest to that end user. The end user could then review the segment list, make changes or decisions about what segments in the list were of interest and then watch those repurposed segments. In such systems, the end user ultimately has control over which individual segments are consumed and in what order they are consumed in.
One challenge to this approach is that the repurposed segments lack end-to-end continuity. In other words, these sequential segments do not make up a coherent media program that was professionally produced. The included segments may come from many different media programs and the producers of those programs did not intend for the segments to be viewed out of context. If one watches the evening news or any professionally produced media program, the order of the segments is carefully chosen by the program's producers. As such, systems for customized media that categorize repurposed content violate this important aspect of media production. Such systems are similar to surfing the Internet in that a user goes from interest to interest, from content provider to content provider, consuming various snippets of information along the way and stopping whenever the user so chooses. Thus, in effect, these approaches are analogous to a list of web sites being created for each end user based on their interests.
Another challenge is that such systems do not account for telecommunication network costs or capacity, which may be especially important as personal media become wireless. Telecommunications networks (e.g., cellular data networks) are typically much more expensive to operate during peak times. As such, a system whereby people review a personal media list and then download the content on-demand would likely lead to many people using the network during a prime time period. This is impractical for wireless communications and many forms of wired communications. For these reasons, approaches that allow end users to interact with a customized media list may be less practical from a commercial perspective.
In addition, such systems typically do not support the advertising model of most media, where the commercial insertions are forced upon an audience at a very specific (usually the most dramatic) point during a program. Furthermore, trends indicate a shifting away from 30-second commercials toward more product placements within the media program itself and such systems cannot practically support this trend. If a user is allowed to choose what component segments are ultimately consumed, then the user likely will choose to bypass the commercial announcements.
Another approach streams segments of content to an end user, whereby a decision about what segment to send next is only determined by the system while the previous segment is streaming. In these approaches, the system is using feedback from the end user terminal to determine what comes next. If a viewer watched an entire segment about boating, maybe the next segment will also be about boating; whereas if the boating segment was skipped, maybe the next segment will be skiing. Such systems require significant amounts of processing power and communications bandwidth at both the broadcaster's end and the end user's terminal. This approach too does not give media producers the control to create a commercially viable product.
Yet another approach sends multiple audio/video streams to a user's terminal and then includes in-band text, tags or placeholders to switch the stream presented to the end user based on either user demographics or other user input or preferences. This approach again suffers from the “bandwidth cost” issue. In such systems, multiple full streams are sent simultaneously to the subscriber terminal, meaning that prime-time bandwidth can be even more strained than in the systems discussed above.
In addition, because of the bandwidth issue, it becomes impractical to present more than a few possible variations of experience to the viewing audience because each possible segment of content has to be streamed to the user terminal so that discrimination can take place by the end user or the end user's terminal. This approach would allow broadcasters to send two or three commercials concurrently during a 30-second commercial break, and would allow different terminals to display different commercials, but this approach can be impractical for other types of non-commercial segments because typically only commercials are produced in a fixed length (i.e., one can stream multiple commercials concurrently because they are all 30-seconds.) Few other types of media segments share this characteristic.
In all of the above approaches, the component segments are not customized to the end user. For example, if two different users are both interested in NFL highlights, both users will receive the identical football highlights, or at a minimum, highlights from only those teams that interest them. That is because the above approaches take traditional media segments and discriminate which segments will be received by which end users. They do this based on a database of end user preferences. That is, if a user likes Green Bay Packer highlights, then the user gets Green Bay Packer highlights, if the user wants a specific area's weather forecast, then they will get a specific area's weather forecast. However, these approaches do not take advantage of the way that media is typically produced.
Because all of these existing methods for customized media rely on user preferences as the key input to the process, the users drive the reception process and the choice of segments as opposed to the producers driving the production process in their production of segments. One reason user preference driven media customization may be inappropriate is that mass media is based on the foresight of media producers to give audiences content that they do not know they want. It is the ability of a producer to take an audience involuntarily down a path that allows suspense, drama or comedy structures to work.